Cord Cutting Progress: CBS All Access and Showtime Each Have A Million Users

Recent trends in the cord cutting industry have been about users moving away from a contract with a cable provider to picking and paying only for the particular media services that they want. It gives the customers a greater choice over what they want and they pay less. They also get the benefit of convenience since they can watch media from their phone, connected TV, or anywhere else.

Although this may sound great, there is the question of how successful these services may be. Some may wonder if cord cutting is a real trend or just a small, vocal group. CBS has recently provided some data on this in their earnings call which may be pointing this to the beginning of a trend.

CBS’s earning call for the quarter was positive, posting earnings per share of $0.92 whereas they were expected to post $0.86 per share. In their call, they revealed that the two services have a total of 2 million subscribers with the split being “about evenly split”. CBS CEO Les Moonves said,

That’s well ahead of where we’d thought we’d be this early in the game.

He is bullish on these new services, attributing their success to why the company has beaten expectations. He has previously believed the services could have a combined 8 million subscribers by the year 2020.

In the coming year there are going to be a number of highly anticipated shows being added to CBS All-Access, including Star Trek: Discovery, and The Good Wife spinoff. Showtime continues to put out high-quality shows as well.

What do you think? Will CBS meet their goal for eight million subscribers in the next four years? Will there be more? Less? Let us know in the comments below.

Nick Felker is a student Electrical & Computer Engineering student at Rowan University (C/O 2017) and the student IEEE webmaster. When he's not studying, he is a software developer for the web and Android (Felker Tech). He has several open source projects on GitHub (http://github.com/fleker)
Devices: Moto G-2013 Moto G-2015, Moto 360, Google ADT-1, Nexus 7-2013 (x2), Lenovo Laptop, Custom Desktop.
Although he was an intern at Google, the content of this blog is entirely independent and his own thoughts.